IV bags are often used in medical environments for administration of liquid medication or other fluids to patients. As the fluid is evacuated from an IV bag and administered to a patient, the volume of fluid remaining in the bag decreases. Depending on the patient's medication regime, the IV bag may need to be replaced as the fluid in the IV bag runs out so that administration of fluid to the patient continues uninterrupted. Accordingly, medical personnel responsible for tending to the patient may need to be aware of a volume of fluid remaining in the IV bag so that the IV bag can be replaced when necessary.
Currently, however, nursing and pharmacy staffs often do not know the status of the fluid level within an IV bag that is connected to a patient and administering fluids. Since patients are often moved from department to department and their IV schedules interrupted, trying to determine volumes based on flow rates and start time of administration are not accurate. Since current methods do not offer sufficient accuracy, hospital pharmacies are often forced to overstock IV medications at the floor level to make sure the medication or other fluid is available when needed.
At some medical facilities, medical personnel perform IV rounds to note where IV bags are in their administration cycles to facilitate planning when the pharmacy should send new IV bags to the nurses attending the respective patients. This manual review of IV bag status may increase time and monetary costs of administering IVs as well as tracking issues. Nursing may replace an IV bag before it is empty because of lack of resources to recheck a volume of fluid remaining in the IV bag if the fluid in the IV bag were allowed to more fully empty. This situation may result in IV fluid being wasted through discarding a large number of IV bags with fluid remaining. In some circumstances, medical staff may arrive to check an IV bag status and/or replace an IV bag well after the IV bag has emptied. This situation may affect patients by interrupting administration of medication to the patient. Further, medical staff arriving after the IV bag has emptied may create a time management issue for medical staff because after discovery of the empty IV bag, medical personnel must retrieve a full IV bag from storage and go through the process of connecting the new IV bag for administration to the patient.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide methods, apparatuses, and computer program products for more efficiently monitoring a volume of fluid in a flexible fluid bag.